


Death and the Deathless Man

by framboise



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bittersweet Ending, Dark, Dark Jon Snow, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, First Time, Possessive Behavior, Resurrection, Supernatural Elements, The War for the Dawn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-12
Updated: 2018-01-12
Packaged: 2019-03-02 16:56:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13322487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/framboise/pseuds/framboise
Summary: Sansa’s powers manifest the night she marries Ramsay Bolton, the moment his hands tear her dress in two, killing everyone in Winterfell almost instantaneously, the lightning that sparks from her body crackling through room after room after room, stopping all hearts except hers dead.Lightning Witch, people call her. Death, others name her.Meanwhile at the Wall, Jon walks out of his own funeral pyre, come back to life as something new.





	Death and the Deathless Man

**Author's Note:**

> If you want visuals for this fic, I made a graphic [here](https://framboise-fics.tumblr.com/post/169614198942/sansas-powers-manifest-the-night-she-marries)

* * *

 

 

 

Sansa’s powers manifest the night she marries Ramsay Bolton, the moment his hands tear her dress in two, killing everyone in Winterfell almost instantaneously, the lightning that sparks from her body crackling through room after room after room, stopping all hearts except hers dead.

She did not want to kill anyone. She did not want to be left alone in Winterfell surrounded by bodies that she is forced to spend the next week tearfully heaving outside its walls and burning in a pyre she lights herself, some of them old dear servants she remembers, some of them familiar faces. A mountain of dead she is responsible for.

She cannot control herself. The lightning sparks up with no warning, humming through her body, almost blinding her eyes with its light, scorching marks on the walls and floor.

When her lightning storm is unleashed, it feels like her body is coming apart at the seams, and when it dies down, she lies on her back staring at the ceiling and panting like she has run a great race, body shivering, ears ringing from the sound, fingers still leaking sparks into the air.

 

She sees lone riders approach in these first few weeks, messengers and scouts and soldiers, but they can see the lightning from outside Winterfell’s walls, sparking out of its windows, can see the pile of burnt body parts and ash in the snow, and they venture no further.

An army will come next, she thinks, an army to retrieve a weapon the like of which Westeros has never before seen.

There had been a Stark ancestor who could create flame from his hands, the songs had said, back in the time of heroes when men were more like gods. Other houses had similar tales of ancestors with strange abilities, and there were rumours that the Targaryens had continued to be born special and kept the exact nature of their gifts a secret for safety, but that house is gone now so Sansa is a monster alone in the world.

Why could this gift, this curse, not have appeared the day her father was going to be killed?

What use was it now?

Oh, she has Winterfell, her family’s keep is her own, but what is it worth if no one else can live in it with her, if lightning is her only companion?

 

She sets to work cleaning rooms, dragging out flaying racks to burn, adding Bolton banners to the flames too, washing floors and walls clean of blood.

She pretends that she is preparing the keep for visitors, perhaps her family returned to her. Sansa is good at pretending, for she has learned that if you do not pretend, the truth of the world will only turn you mad.

The only thing she does not do is sharpen or clean the weapons that the Boltons have left behind, piling them up haphazardly in the armoury instead - for what need does she have of swords and daggers and lances, when she is deadlier than all of them combined?

She is amazed that her lightning does not set the whole keep alight, but it seems to be drawn to living things rather than wood and fabric and stone: it races through the halls looking for rats or curious birds and if it finds none, it flees through the windows towards the sky, searching for prey.

She does not like killing the birds, but she eats them all the same. She works her way slowly through the food stores that have been provisioned for a whole keep and that can, she guesses, feed her for years more even without the milk and eggs that she is used to, before she will have to replenish them somehow.

Her mother had taught her how to manage a keep and a household, hardly expecting her to take on every job herself, but that is what she does. She cooks, cleans, ferries water for shallow baths, feeds fires and cuts wood, makes candles and dries any meat she brings back from brief hunts in the forest, picks herbs, oils the hinges of gates and doors, blackens braziers, tends to the plants in the glass gardens and harvests vegetables. It is only now that she truly respects the backbreaking work of every servant she has ever had. But what use is respect to those servants she has already killed with her powers?

 

It is a lonely life, and she misses other living creatures; finds herself aching for a cat to stroke, a horse to ride, a living bird to sing to.

She feels like a ghost, and thinks sometimes that perhaps she is already dead and this is only some kind of hell.

What future does she have, what can a girl whose touch kills do in a world full of living things?

Perhaps she should venture North, abandon herself beyond the Wall, but a selfish part of herself wants to stay right here in Winterfell. If only that she might wake up one morning and find herself magically back where she began, surrounded by her family again, and loved once more.

 

*

 

They burn Jon's body so that he does not turn into a wight, but he walks out of his funeral pyre anyway, come back to life as something new.

Fire cannot burn him, dragonglass cannot wound him, steel cannot kill him.

The Night's Watch look at him as if he is a demon come to haunt them, come to do justice, but he finds he cannot care, watches them with his dark eyes and feels little.

He talks with Edd next a fire lit to burn some other poor fool who has died of the cold, and tries to answer Edd's questions.

_What did you see beyond, what was death like, how did it feel to burn, why are you not hurt, can you die again, what will you do now?_

Jon feels a nothingness, an ache where his heart used to be, he tries to explain, a coldness, a bleak numbness.

They say that Ghost walked into the fire after him and disappeared. Does that mean that Ghost is a part of him now, are man and beast one? Or was Ghost his soul and now that he is gone, Jon's soul is gone too?

A deathless man cannot be Lord Commander, the Night's Watch cannot inch towards the otherworldly madness of that other ancient Stark, the Night's King, so he urges Edd to take the mantle, and stares at the other men until they vote him in.

The men are terrified of Jon but he cannot even take a dark delight in it, he takes delight in nothing.

And then he discovers that he is not a Stark, but a Targaryen, thanks to letters from Sam and Howland Reed, and he finds that he knows their words are true for who else could walk out of fire unharmed but a dragon?

He walks along the top of the Wall, through the snow and winds, staring out at the North.

He cannot sleep, he barely eats or drinks.

He is no longer a man nor a Stark now, and yet when news comes to the Wall of the last Stark, of Sansa, he feels a spark of concern, the echo of an emotion.

She has been married to the Bolton bastard, the ravens say, and his head is full of pictures of her fair skin flayed to the bone, of her cowering from that monstrous man.

But the next ravens, and the travellers who make it through the snows, say something different.

That Sansa has killed her husband, killed everyone in Winterfell.

She is a witch, they say, a monster who sparks lightening from her hands, she is Death come to stalk the North and kill them all.

Jon has met Death before and he is not afraid to meet her once again, so he packs a bag and steals a horse, and sets off south to Winterfell, to learn the truth about what has happened to his cousin.

 

*

 

One day when she looks from the window of her tower solar, she sees a familiar figure on a horse, bundled up in black furs. Familiar but older than she remembers; a man now, not a boy. _Jon_.

"Don't come any closer!" she calls out of the window, her voice weak with disuse. "Go back, Jon, don't come closer!" 

_Don't let me kill my own brother, please_ , she prays.

But he does not seem to hear her and rides closer still. She stares down at her hands, her fingers have started to spark, her hair flickers at its end with power.

"Go away!" she screams, but he is in the courtyard now, shaking his head.

He gets off his horse and ties it up near the gate, and trudges closer. He looks worn and tired, but determined.

"Go away!" she shouts but he has disappeared from view, he is inside the keep.

Her room is lit up by lightening now, it is fizzing through her limbs, arcing around her, jolting out towards the door. She walks out of her room and down the stairs. Maybe if he sees her from a distance, sees what she is, he will run away and save himself.

He is there at the end of the corridor, staring at her with sad eyes.

"Jon," she sobs.

The lightening is creeping down towards him, eager and deadly.

"Sansa," he says.

"Don't let me hurt you," she says.

"You won't hurt me."

He walks closer. She is going to split apart. The hall is full of light now, the power crackling from her. The edges of it touch him and she shuts her eyes and cries, she will not watch him die.

The world beyond her eyelids glows whiter still, her body hums and sparks.

"Sansa," she hears, but she will not open her eyes to see a ghost. "Sansa," the calm voice says again.

A hand touches her cheek and she grits her eyes closed.

"Sansa, it's alright, I'm here."

"Jon," she sobs.

His arms move around her, hug her, but still she sparks.

She opens her eyes.

Jon is warm and alive even as her lightening fills the corridor. He moves back and she looks at his face lit up by the sparks. He's smiling a sad smile and she feels a laugh come out of her throat.

"You're alive," she says.

"I am," he says, the corner of his mouth twitching.

 

*

 

Sansa looks older than he remembers, tired and worn and yet so beautiful too. Standing there in the middle of a storm of her creation, she looked like a goddess, like some being of pure light and vengeance. And when her storm touched him, his heart was filled with life again, his body hummed in the purest agony of sensation, he felt _alive_.

He wants her, and not just because of the way she can make him feel. He wants her and it is not surprising to him, it feels _right_. But since he does not know how she feels about him, he will care for her like a brother until such time as he might be her lover.

They lie on the bed in her room once her storm has lessened, the room lit by the small shuddering sparks that leech from her body.

"You're alive," she says again, and turns towards him, strands of her hair lifting to the ceiling with the remnants of her power. "How?"

"I was killed," he says, and takes off his cloak, his jerkin, his tunic, to show her the gouges in his flesh that remained even when he walked out of the fire. The last scars he will ever have since he can no longer be injured.

She cries over the marks and the room fills with her storm once again and he gasps and lies back, overwhelmed, trying to comfort her.

"Did you kill them, the men that did this to you?" she asks.

"No," he says, "when I walked out of my funeral pyre I felt nothing. I felt _dead_ , dead until I saw you again."

"I thought I was a ghost. But here you are, alive, and I can touch you," she says, running her hands along his shoulders, "and you won't die."

He can feel his body start to stir but he ignores it.

"We are the last Starks," she says, sitting up on the bed and curling her hands around her knees.

"You are the last Stark," he says, and lifts a hand to stroke her hair, still the colour of flames, the colour of his funeral pyre. "I am not father's son."

"You are!" she says, turning to hold his face in her hands. Her eyes are as blue as the sky on a rare clear day.

He shakes his head, which makes her hands rub against his cheeks and his thick beard. She pauses, her fingers rubbing through the hair, and then takes her hands back.

"My mother was Lyanna," he says, "My father Rhaegar. This is why I could walk out of the fire, why I still live."

"Targaryens were not invincible. Rhaegar - your father - died."

Jon shrugs. "It's the only explanation I have."

"Then you are not my brother," she says, and stands up from the bed to look at him, as he stares guilelessly back. "You are my cousin."

"I am."

 

As the days go by and Sansa shows him how to help her around the keep, as he cuts wood from the forest and ferries water, cooks and cleans, as he sits with her by the fire and they share halting memories or a comfortable quietness, as he trains in the courtyard with Longclaw, she watches him, she considers him. He does his best not to preen under her gaze, not to stare back and let his eyes roam her form. He waits for her to come to him.

But when one of her storms arrive, when lightening flees from her, he doesn't look away, he walks closer and holds her by the hands or the shoulders or the waist, gripping her tightly and tethering her to the earth as she calls out that she is going to split apart. He stares into her eyes and she stares back, and it is as if they are the only two alive in the whole world.

 

*

 

Her brother is her cousin, and she cannot hurt him. He says that he has been brought back as something new, something old, _different_ , but to her he is familiar. Sullen and brooding, with his strange downturned smile and wild hair soft as wool, with his kindness that he tries to keep hidden and his righteous fury that he lets loose in the training ground.

He is handsome, Jon, handsome like she never knew. And he watches her secretly, when he thinks she does not see. He wants her and it makes her belly tremble, makes lightning spark from her knees, the back of her neck, makes lightning spark _inside_.

One day they open a dusty cask of wine found hidden in the secret stores of Winterfell, and they drink so much that the world spins, and then she leans over and kisses him and he kisses her back, devouring her like she is everything he has ever wanted to taste.

The next morning, after they wake fully clothed on her bed, and as the light of her lightning makes their wine-headaches worse, she tells him that he must marry her at the heart tree in the Godswood before he is allowed to kiss her again.

And he says, _It was you that kissed me first but, aye, I'll marry you, I'll have you for a wife_ , and she rolls her eyes and tells him that he is a true romantic, and then he kneels on the floor, with his solemn dark eyes, and tells her that he loves her, that he would never be parted from her, that he will protect her and cherish her, provide for her, comfort her, that he will keep her satisfied, in bed and out of it, forever more.

And at that, she takes his hand and drags him to the Godswood, unwilling to wait even one more moment, not while he looks at her with such love and hunger.

It's snowing outside as they say their vows, with only the gods and a single raven perched on a branch to witness them, and then he lifts her up into his arms and strides back into the keep and she almost swoons at her own hunger, at the strength of his body cradling hers.

He strips her dress from her, tears it off, while she scrabbles at his own clothes, and then he kisses her, every part of her, sucks and licks and sets his mouth at her cunt to sup from her, to make her peak with a scream that echoes down the empty halls of their home. He crawls up over her as her body starts to spark, pulling her thighs apart with his broad hands, lifting her legs around his hips and kissing her as he makes her his, as he thrusts inside of her, grunting, and crooning sweet words to her, and when she peaks once more, the room fills with white, and lightning arcs through room after room after room, spreading out towards the sky, and he groans as if he is dying anew.

 

*

 

He has taken her for his wife, she is his, and none shall split them asunder. She is his, and he is hers.

He can feast on her cunt whenever he likes, he can make her peak, make her wild with her pleasure, he can stroke her soft skin and play with her hair, he can lay his head on her belly and gaze up at her, he can run a finger from freckle to freckle across her back, and nuzzle at the thatches of hair underneath her arms until she swats him away and he does his penance between her thighs. He can watch her as she rides him, as she touches him, and kisses him, he can listen to her songs and stories, he can argue with her and embrace her when she weeps for the things she has lost, he can spend every moment of every day in her company, drinking his fill, and every moment of the night too for he does not need to sleep. He can hold her when she storms and the lightning jolts through his body, filling him with her light and fury.

They have everything they need here, each other and a keep of their very own, he desires nothing more.

And yet the world outside will not let them be.

Ravens arrive, and are killed by her lightning before they reach their roosts, even as she shouts at them to go away because she cannot bear to hurt them.

Messengers come too, travellers and soldiers. They stand at a distance from the keep and shout out their messages, disturbing their peace and quiet. And if they do not leave, Jon goes out with his sword and beats them away, and then returns to Sansa covered with their blood that she tenderly washes away, her face clouded with emotions he wishes she did not feel - regret, shame, worry.

And then one day, a king arrives, and Sansa tells him he must go and speak with him, that he must not strike him down.

"I want an audience with your cousin," Stannis tells him.

"No," he says.

Stannis only wants to use her to gain the throne for himself, and Jon cares nothing about thrones and kings and rulers anymore.

"She's dangerous," Stannis says.

Jon stares at him. "As long as anyone doesn't get close, she won't hurt them."

"Is that a threat?"

"It might be."

"You know about the White Walkers and their army. You know there is a war coming," Stannis says. "Can she not help us? Can her powers not help the world of the living?"

"I don't know," Jon says after a pause. He has thought little of the horrors that lie beyond the Wall since he returned here, since her. He finds it hard to care about anything except Sansa, her comfort and care, and how it is to be with her, the way the lightning feels inside of his body, the way he feels when he is inside her body.

"Think on it, Jon. Think of your duty, of her duty."

His lip curls, he has had enough of duty. He turns away.

"The army is coming!" Stannis calls after him, as Jon walks towards Winterfell and Sansa's storm that leaks out of every window, reaching for him. "The dead march on Westeros and they will come for you too!"

 

"What did he mean?" Sansa asks when Jon has returned to her and kissed her and held her, when her storm has simmered down.

Jon shakes his head and hides his face in her belly, sucking on the skin to distract her.

She tugs his hair painfully. "Tell me," she orders.

And Jon tells her about the White Walkers, about the wights, about the army of the dead.

If Sansa was like him, dark and numb inside, caring about nothing but her, she would listen to what he has to tell and decide to do nothing, decide to stay here behind their walls together and be safe.

But Sansa is not a hollow, hungry shell like him; and that is why he loves her; she is not deadened like him, she is Death herself. And Death does not cower behind walls, it does not wait to be found, but strides forth with a hunger of its own.

And so they leave Winterfell. He and Sansa, in their cloaks, walking hand in hand, for any horse that came near her would only die, and they head back to the place where he was killed, and towards the dead that wait beyond.

 

*

 

"You decided to do this, to travel North and fight. But I will decide _how_ we do it, _I_ will make the plan," he says with his sullen mouth and brooding eyes, as they sit around the fires they build on the journey North.

"You could have stayed at Winterfell," she says, "I would have returned to you."

"No," he growls and then he takes her face in his hands, looking young and pained and lost. "I'll never leave you," he says. "We stay together, always."

"Aye," she says, and the corner of his mouth twitches with a smirk and she closes her eyes and laughs.

She is laughing more now, she feels a burden has been lifted. For this is the reason why her powers came to her, she knows now, it was so that she could fight the army of the dead that threatens Westeros. This is how she will do her penance for killing the people that she did, how she can repay the gods for saving her from that first marriage and bringing Jon back to her, for giving them those sweet months together.

 

"I'm scared," she admits, as they stand on top of the Wall and look at the army gathered beyond. His notion of a plan is useless now. The army is out there and they will walk out to face it.

"Don't be scared," he says, squeezing her hand so tightly it almost hurts. "I am with you. And besides, they say that you are Death, and what can Death fear from dead men?"

She kisses him and he crowds her against a wall of ice and works his hands underneath her clothes, tugs at his own laces so he can take her up against that wall, his thrusts making her moan, his words - about the nights he spent in his narrow bed here, dreaming of a cunt as hot as hers, dreaming of a girl as sweet as she - make her cry and wail.

And then he helps her dress again, softly, reverently, kneeling before her and staring up at her with solemn eyes, and she tells him she loves him, that he is good and kind and brave, that she would have no other but him.

 

*

 

Letting her walk through the final gate of the tunnel, holding her hand and walking beside her and not dragging her back inside, is agony, a searing pain he feels deep in his chest where his heart once was.

She has already started to spark, white threads spit from her fingers, from the ends of her hair, as they approach the horde of the dead who stand and watch them. He holds Longclaw in one fist, and her hand in the other, as the army parts uneasily and he and Sansa walk through towards the White Walkers on their dead horses.

But after a while, as they move further and further into the tightening crowd, as her lightning builds, turning those she brushes against into clouds of ash, the wights start to notice them, start to _see_ them, and then they attack.

He cuts them down with his sword, whirling, stabbing, slashing; holding Sansa and her lightning behind him so that he throws a shadow of himself before him. This is what he was made for, for killing, for protecting her, and his body moves with an ease it has never had before. Every wight that her lightning touches, that his sword slices through, is annihilated but it is not enough, the crowd is too large.

Still, he battles through, his mind narrowed to the width of his blade, to the warmth of her at his back, and then they find themselves at the very centre of the horde only a few steps away from the White Walkers themselves, and her lightning starts to shake the ice under their feet, arc through the crowd and up towards the sky.

He turns around, brings her into the shelter of his arms. "Now," he tells her, "let go now," he says, and he holds her face in his hands, memorising the cold blue of her eyes, the flush of her cheeks, and he kisses her, and she unleashes her storm, and the world goes white.

 

***

_Of the fate of Death and the deathless man, many things are said, in the years after they vanquish the White Walkers and their army and save Westeros._

_That the two of them vanished, consumed by the inferno of the lightning, burning themselves up to save the world of men._

_That they walked away from the storm, hand in hand towards the North where the white of her lightning would be indistinguishable from the colour of the snow and the sky, and there would be no other living creatures for her to hurt._

_That the final lightning storm burnt both their gifts from them, leaving them as an ordinary man and woman, who were glimpsed heading south for a quiet life in the warmth far from all the things that had hurt them. That he put down his sword and picked up a milking pail and scythe instead. That every time thunder and lightning split the sky of their new home, they took to their bed and tried to match its noise with their own.  
_

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> please comment, I'd love to know what people think!
> 
> my tumblr: [framboise-fics](http://framboise-fics.tumblr.com)
> 
> and there's a rebloggable photoset for this fic [here](https://framboise-fics.tumblr.com/post/169614198942/sansas-powers-manifest-the-night-she-marries)


End file.
